ABSTRACT
For Meyerhold, the dream of staging Hamlet was a leitmotif of his entire career. From his first encounter with the Danish prince, as played by the touring actor Nikolai Rossov in 1891 in Penza, to commissioning a new translation of the tragedy from Boris Pasternak, that dream repeatedly seemed to be taking shape, yet was never realised. He was reported as saying: ‘Write on my gravestone: here lies an actor and director who never acted and never directed Hamlet.’ The iconic status of this Hamlet-that-was-not-to-be continues to be a source of inspiration for such ventures as the ‘Hamlet Project’ at the University of Warwick and a recent sound installation in Russia entitled ‘Hamlet: Meyerhold’s plans, for conductor with orchestra’.
The shifts in attitude evident throughout Meyerhold’s numerous references to the play reveal the evolving nature of his approach both to Hamlet itself and to theatre in general, as well as reflecting changes in the cultural-political climate of the time and artists’ obligations to manoeuvre accordingly. Previous accounts of Meyerhold’s relationship and obsession with Hamlet are incomplete and heavily reliant on personal memories and tendentious hypotheses. Using rarely or never previously examined archival material from RGALI (the Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts), the Bakhrushin Musuem, and BGAMLI (the Belorussian State Archive and Museum of Literature and the Arts) among others, this essay aims to draw together a narrative of Meyerhold’s relationship with Hamlet, reassessing the factual bases from existing reports and taking into account Meyerhold’s other works and his statements regarding other major Hamlet productions during his lifetime. Furthermore, a reconsideration of the 1941 and 1946 productions of Hamlet in Belorussia by Valerian Bebutov, formerly Meyerhold’s assistant, may give some indication of how Meyerhold’s latest thoughts on the tragedy might have crystallised in reality had his career not been ended by his arrest, torture, and execution in 1940.
